Take a minute to go over this post from Dirk-jan Mollema. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait…
Did you realize how scary that kind of attack is? As an IT guy who specializes in Exchange server and loves studying security, that article scared the snot out of me. Based on my experience with organizations of all sizes I can say with a good bit of authority that almost every Exchange organization out there is probably vulnerable to this attack.…
I’ve decided to start a short series of posts on data encryption, which is becoming an increasingly important subject in IT as government regulations and privacy concerns demand ever increasing levels of privacy and security.
In this series, I’ll try to cover the more confusing concepts in encryption, including the three main types of encryption systems used today; Private Key encryption, Public Key Encryption, and SSL/TLS encryption.…
IT people, for some reason, seem to have an affinity towards designing solutions that use “cool” features, even when those features aren’t really necessary. This tendency sometimes leads to good solutions, but a lot of times it ends up creating solutions that fall short of requirements or leave IT infrastructure with significant short-comings in any number of areas.…
Here’s an interesting trick that might help you resolve some of your DNS management woes, particularly if you have a different Public and Private DNS zone in your environment. For instance, you have a domain name of whatever.com externally, but use whatever.local internally. When your DNS is set up like that, all attempts to access systems using the whatever.com…
I’ve run into a number of people who get confused about this subject when trying to determine how to get their On-Prem accounts and Office 365 synced and working properly. Most often, people are making a comment somewhere that says, “Just use Password sync, it’s just as good and doesn’t require a server,” or something similar.…
If you’ve had to work with Active Directory or Exchange, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a feature of DNS called a SRV record. SRV records are an extremely important part of Active Directory (They are, in fact, the foundation of AD) and an optional part of Exchange Autodiscover. There are a lot of other applications that use SRV records to some degree or another (Lync/Skype for Business relies heavily on them, for instance).The…
One famous misquote of American Founding Father Ben Franklin goes like this, “Anyone who would sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither.” At first glance, this statement speaks to the heart of people who have spent hours waiting in line at the airport, waiting for a TSA agent to finish groping a 90 year old lady in a wheel chair so they can take off their shoes and be guided into a glass tube to be bombarded with the emissions of a full body scanner.…
The most important step in diagnosing a specific security error involves determining what the error is telling you. There are a few things that can cause certificate errors, and what you do depends entirely on what is causing the error to begin with. Once you know what the error is telling you, it becomes much easier to figure out what you need to do next.…
Autodiscover is one of the more annoying features of Exchange since Microsoft reworked the way their Email solution worked in Exchange 2007. All versions since have implemented it and Microsoft may eventually require its use in versions following Exchange 2016. So how does Autodiscover work?
Prior to Exchange 2007, Outlook clients had to be configured manually.…